Best of this Week Summary 30 November - 06 December 2009

• A top 10 of SOA myths revisited.
  


• Google is slowly pulling the plug on Gears (mainly used as offline browser storage) in favor of HTML5; see the posts for a bunch of reasons. Google: "We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers."
  


• A couple of interesting Java topics found during Devoxx 2009: Kanban, Spring-ActionScript (Spring-Flex integration), and a couple of technologies to detect and prevent coding errors before they actually happen.
  


• True or false: if the comments are ugly, the code is ugly? I agree: if your comments are sloppy, you very likely also will be in the actual code?
  Don't forget to read the referenced "three rules" C post.
  

Best of this Week Summary 09 November - 15 November 2009

• A post on experiences with Git coming from Subversion. Too bad the reasons why the author is having more and more problems with Subversion were not given. Though you can deduct (some(?) of) them from the text.
  


• Presentation by John Resig (from JQuery fame) on testing javascript. Shortly describes QUnit, JSUnit, YUITest for unittesting, Screw.Unit, JSSpec for behavior testing (unittesting broken up by task), Selenium for functional testing and Crosscheck, Env.js, Blueridge for server-side Javascript testing. Also describes browser launching, which I would translate into "build/test management", distributed testing (Selenium, TestSwarm) and browser support (cost vs benefit).
  


• "A Decade of SOA: Where are we, Where are we Going?" The viewpoints from a virtual panel of Enterprise Architects who have lived and implemented SOA for most of this decade.
  


• Why iStockphoto embraced Google's Gears.
  


• And as grand final this week: the hardware and (rails) software architecture of Ravelry, a knit and crochet community.
  

Best of this Week Summary 03 May - 09 June 2007

• An interview with writers of new book about REST. One free chapter for download. Interesting is the interview with the writers were they explain why they think REST is great and (when) preferable above WS-* (SOAP).
  
• An overview of nine free virtualization environments. Plus one free spreadsheet to compute the TCO of virtualization.
  
• Interest points made about what Google Gears does not yet support out-of-the-box, like synchronization strategies. But as mentioned already a little bit in the article, the correct synchronization strategy depends on the application you are building. So maybe Gears could (should?) have contained already one or two simple syncing strategies. Also, I think saying it replaces one problem with another is a not really correct. I'd say Gears is a starting point in providing a full offline library/framework solution, but it does not solve all problems at this point in time.
  
• The writers of the book "GWT in Action" answered a couple of questions on their impression is on GWT after a year.
  
  Most important points made:
  - Regarding debugging: most of the time you don't need to go into the generated Javascript,
  - The great fact that you can re-use all your Java knowledge and tools,
  - That for simple apps it would still be too heavy-weight (overkill),
  - How GWT tries to make the generated Javascript as little as bloated as possible,
  - That the generated Javascript code can be output in pretty, more readable Javascript,
  - A GWT application can mix Javascript and Java (so it is not that "crippled" as it seems),
  - There are wrappers available for Scriptaculous, JSCalendar etc,
  - Javascript files are provided per browser type, instead of one big file that handles all browsers,
  - Changing locale can require you to switch to a dynamic approach, losing GWT stripping,
  - Modularization can be improved; now you have to always download all modules that your application uses.

Best of this Week Summary 27 May - 02 June 2007

• This article shows why you probably shouldn't use subdomains to differentiate user accounts as in http://username.mydomain.com, giving a very good reason not to if you're using SSL. Use a REST style (like on Flickr, Del.icio.us) instead, like http://www.mydomain.com/username/. A reason you *could* be using it is to prevent XSS in user generated content sites...


• How does OpenID work and how can you integrate it into your applications.
  OpenID is an open centralized authentication approach. It performs the same functionalities as SAML but is a slimmed down and lighter version to use. The article gives a good overview and also goes into the protocol details. It also shows how to implement OpenID with OpenID4Java.


• Firefox plugins are getting more and more attention of hackers via a man-in-the-middle attack. An effective way of implementing this kind of attack is by setting up your own wifi-accesspoint, let your malicious code scan for what comes by, and insert a modified Firefox plugin. SSL connections like on the offical Firefox plugins website do not run this risk (or to be more precise, very limited).


• Of course the announcement of the availability of Google's Gears was a biggie.
  
  It consists of three major components:
  LocalServer:
  Database:
  and WorkerPool (async javascript):
  Dojo Offline will be ported to move its API on top of Gears. Trying to make this an industry standard, Google is working with Adobe to get it integrated with Apollo.
  You can use the three components also seperately, you don't need to only use it for writing synchronzation software.
  Note that the workers in the WorkerPool are not threads, that is, they don't share anything with eachother, so they should be considered more as separate processes rather than threads.
  Here's a couple of nice examples with explanation on how you can use Gears.
  The question you can ask yourself is whether we should go down this Javascript road. It is so hard to create rich controls which work well always on all browsers. Are the desktop solutions (Apollo, JavaFX) the better way to go?